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Essay on space colonization
June 16, 2007 – 9:45 pm
Science fiction writer Charlie Stross published an essay, titled “The High Frontier, Redux”, on space colonization on his blog. The essay is both interesting and entertaining. Excerpt:
Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that’s before you factor in the price of bringing them back …
(…)
We’re human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet’s surface area. (Earth is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or desert or mountain, we aren’t well-adapted to thriving there.) Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that’s not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there’s the travel time. Five and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars.
(…)
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
GE will not challenge for Dow Jones
June 16, 2007 – 7:02 pm
According to the Financial Times, General Electric is not going to challenge Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion bid for Dow Jones. GE/NBC was going to make a counter-offer in cooperation with Microsoft, but apparently they decided to not bid on Dow Jones. Rupert Murdoch’s news and media empire is huge already, but if he will indeed acquire Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal this will leave his media company in an even more powerful situation. Murdoch had already bought MySpace.com for $580 million. Imagine the possibilities if Murdoch’s News Corp. started to migrate from the traditional media to the Internet full-time, or if it started to merge all services into one huge Internet-based service. The future is in the Internet and there is no way around moving from offline to online. Offline advertising spendings are already declining heavily as advertising dollars are migrating to the web. Rupert Murdoch would own one of the most valuable and most powerful companies in the world over night if News Corp.’s focus was on the online business of its companies.
Denison and Porter to Enter German Real Estate Market
June 16, 2007 – 6:39 pm
US investment firm Denison and Porter is going to open its first office in Germany by the end of 2007. D&P has plans to establish an office in the growing real estate market of Muenster, a city in Western Germany.
As the company’s first office on the continent, this is an important step in forming a regional presence. D&P’s managing director announced the plans to a receptive audience of board members on Friday noting that “it is the character of this company which has permitted us to plant a seed in a market that is otherwise dominated by a very predictable demographic.”
The company plans to redirect equity investment currently focused in North America, to the new market and plans to open its second alternative private equity establishment, in the food services industry, by the first quarter of 2008. In addition, DP Deutschland will begin assessing a diversified group of private equity assets with the goal of acquiring its first commercial property by the second quarter of 2008.
Source: Newswire
Quoted: Robin Williams
June 16, 2007 – 6:23 pm
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” – Robin Williams
Fish Markets
June 16, 2007 – 12:19 pm
Fish markets are somewhat fascinating to me. You walk by all those market stands with tables, boxes and barrels filled with fish, and you see these colors that have an earthy but at the same time aqueous tone. Wherever you turn and look, you see this gory gloom, and you smell the dead fish as it overwhelms your sense of smell. Fish markets offer a raw picture of human life with all those people from different countries doing the same thing, selling dead fish and seafood, and chopping off fish heads and grubbing in bowels, which is probably the reason why I’ve always been fascinated by them. And there is this strange feeling to be followed, because there are thousands of dead eyeballs with dull expressions looking at you from all directions in every instant you are in the market. It’s a weird feeling that makes you concentrate on yourself and you realize that you can barely return the look of the dead fish’s eyes, it’s a feeling as if the fish and these other strange creatures from Davy Jones’s locker were first judging and then disapproving you, which is absurd, of course, but you can’t help it. Then, when you leave the market, you turn around, because you want to steal just one more glance at this surreal world, this coexistence of life and death.
Movie Quote #2
June 16, 2007 – 11:41 am
[In California]
Annie Hall: It’s so clean out here.
Alvy Singer: That’s because they don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.
from: ”Annie Hall” (1977)
Skyscrapers, Sun, Exploding
June 16, 2007 – 11:36 am
Skyscrapers under exploding sun.
Small pixel painting I made with MS Paint in April 2007.
Twin Peaks Intro
June 15, 2007 – 9:07 pm
Twin Peaks (1990-1991)
Has there ever been an intro more beautiful than this one? I doubt it. It’s a pity that the series, directed by David Lynch, was canceled after no more than 29 episodes.
Quoted: Adolf Berle
June 15, 2007 – 8:49 pm
“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” – Adolf Berle
